God could no more create a most perfect world without evil than He could create a square circle. If we were omniscient and could see the whole of creation over the whole of time, we would realize its perfection. Over time we will learn the connections between sin and suffering, and better understand God’s wisdom.

The tragedy wasn’t caused so much by the earthquake as by the idiocy of packing so many people into an urban environment which is foolish humanity’s method for making earthquakes as horrible as possible.

I think you’re right after all. All these attempts to excuse-away suffering and praise this as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ are just philosophers brown-nosing God in the hopes of getting on His good side.

I’m starting to distrust the intuition that says virtue and reward are systematically, necessarily connected. All human moral effort seems an attempt to fulfill this intuition, but it fails, and so requires faith in a Divine judge to set the scales right in the end.

That’s too passive. The aim of philosophy is to describe reality in terms of the divine ideal it is enacting — a divine ideal that is the same as that of enlightened human reason — and then to press our reason on reality, to make our ‘ought’ an ‘is’ by force or to understand every ‘is’ as an ‘ought’ by reason.

Come to think of it, if we knew that there was a necessary connection between virtue and reward, that would be the end of virtue, as it would just be subsumed by self-interest. What makes an action virtuous is that we do it because it is right, not because we expect fortuitous consequences.

anonymous

So we should always do ‘the right thing’ whatever the consequences? What if a murderer asks me if his intended victim is hiding in my cellar, is it okay to lie to him and say ‘No’?

In such a case, you shouldn’t lie. How confident can you be in the consequences of your actions? What if you lie and the murderer goes away only to immediately find your friend who has, unbeknownst to you, crawled out your cellar window to try to escape?

It’s kind of like imagining that although this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it could be quasi-better if some of our freedom were replaced with natural laws that compelled goodness; if we behave as though those laws were already in force, we get the goodness and the freedom too. Imagine that you yourself were God creating the perfect world with the principles you choose.

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